Dreamers of a New Day. Sheila Rowbotham
de Cleyre (Labadie Collection, University of Michigan)
Self-ownership, greater equality in sexual relationships, interconnections between personal behaviour and external political demands, along with free love, were all being discussed in the socialist movement during the late nineteenth century. Edith Lanchester’s free union in defiance of her family in 1895 brought the issue of sexuality out into the open and caused ripples of controversy. However, prominent women socialists, whose position was already socially and culturally precarious because of their politics, were inclined to be wary. As the Independent Labour Party activist Margaret McMillan put it, ‘Marriage is bad and Free Love is worse’.27
Many women who sought to live more autonomously were inclined to associate sex with danger. Meridel LeSueur, who would become a novelist, came from a left-wing background in the Mid-West and her mother was a feminist. As a young woman in Greenwich Village before World War One, she met and admired Emma Goldman, but contrasted Goldman’s frank acceptance of sexual pleasure with the attitudes of her mother’s generation.
Many of them felt sex was a humiliating force, symbolic of their repression – of marriage and child-bearing – and it represented to them violence, rape, and enslavement. Many of them at that time felt a woman had only two choices: living her own life with a career and calling as a radical, or marriage with sex and children.28
In the late nineteenth century the conviction that women needed to be protected from male sexuality encouraged women reformers in both countries to become involved in efforts to eradicate prostitution. An unintended consequence was that over-zealous police harried women they thought were not ‘respectable’. In Britain in 1885 a broad coalition led by the supporter of women’s rights, Josephine Butler, secured the abolition of the Contagious Diseases Act which had sanctioned forced physical examinations of women whom police suspected of prostitution. The National Vigilance Association was formed as a result of the campaign. However, divisions arose between women concerned to protect working-class prostitutes from destitution, and vigilance campaigners who wanted to close brothels by force. Among the latter was Laura Ormiston Chant, a supporter of the Liberal Party, women’s suffrage, temperance and social purity. Although initially distrustful of state intervention, Chant and other social-purity activists began to shift from simply campaigning to seeking changes in local and national government policy. In the 1890s Chant, with allies from the British Women’s Temperance Association, successfully put pressure on a coalition of Progressives on the London County Council to restrict licences to music halls that featured acts of which they disapproved. In 1901 a vigorous campaign against prostitution was mounted by Progressives, evangelicals, feminists and temperance supporters against prostitution; it targeted the women rather than their male clients, an approach which caused conflict among social-purity feminists.29
Social purity was also a powerful force in the United States. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union could mobilize women on a mass scale, while women’s clubs and women in social settlements combined with members of the Christian League for the Promotion of Social Purity and the Mothers’ Congress, not only in the campaigns against prostitution but in attempts to regulate theatres, dance halls and the new cinemas. As in Britain, voluntary groups began to press for municipal and legislative intervention. Some moral reformers also came to realize the need for practical services to support and retrain prostitutes. The Florence Crittenton homes provided a refuge for young girls as well as training them in domestic service and nursing.30
If the reformers’ zeal could be coercive and repressive, the social-purity movement nonetheless contained several subversive sub-texts. Some moral campaigners demanded equal moral standards for men and women, while their efforts to curb incest, rape and violence within families broached the question of the extent to which relations within the family were to be regulated. Moreover, by marshalling powerful emotive arguments, they generated a public discussion of hitherto unmentionable topics such as venereal disease. The social purity regulators, like their antithesis the free lovers, contrived to bring sex into the public arena.
When social-purity women spoke out on platforms and in committees, it was evident that the boundary between women actively asserting their allotted ‘female’ role of moral purification in a public context, and breaking through the prevailing conventions about the woman’s sphere, could be frangible. Indeed, Chant’s efforts to close brothels led to her being castigated as a ‘new woman’.31
From the 1880s¸ moral reformers who went into the urban slums to rescue the poor from drink, vice and family violence could find themselves moving on to other social issues. In both countries, social purity contributed to the emergence of broader reform coalitions which sought to tackle urban problems in the early 1900s.32 The attempt to redeem could shake assumptions. When the future campaigner against lead contamination, Alice Hamilton, braved a brothel in Toledo to rescue a prostitute, she found, instead of the victim she had expected, ‘a woman of mature years, handsome, dignified, entirely mistress of herself’ in a house that was ‘luxurious but vulgarly ugly’. The meeting was an occasion for mutual incomprehension. The young idealistic reformer heard the calculating voice of a tradeswoman. ‘I might make a good saleswoman . . . for I spend my time persuading men to spend money on what they don’t really want.’ For her part, the prostitute was appalled by Hamilton’s altruistic settlement life in the Chicago slums: ‘That is not the sort of thing I could possibly do,’ she observed with disgust.33 The reformers’ values could also be challenged. From 1910 the upper-middle-class Bostonian Fanny Quincy Howe regularly corresponded with a Jewish prostitute and morphine addict, Maimie Pinzer, who told Howe she regarded divorce as ‘a lot of foolishness and a marriage ceremony the worst lot of cant I ever heard’.34 Such encounters resulted in a steep learning curve.
As moral reform fused with wider action in communities, perspectives could subtly alter. By 1915, when the radical Mary Beard wrote Woman’s Work in Municipalities, reformers were looking at preventative action and trying to understand the social and cultural bases of moral problems. So while club women in Pittsburg, Kansas were busy securing the censorship of ‘all films depicting scenes of crime, drinking scenes, and suggestive “love scenes”’, more imaginative reformers sought not simply to ban, but to influence the content of the new leisure industry in an effort to ensure pleasurable improvement.35
The new approach of positive intervention also led them to embark on sex education. Beard reported that by 1914, women’s meetings were being held to discuss teaching ‘sex hygiene’. Speaking to the Council of Jewish Women, Dr Rosalie Morton pointed out that women must take on the issue in their own homes rather than leaving the topic of sex to men alone. In the past she claimed women had been ‘too sentimental, they have been too ignorant of their limitations in the world of practical affairs; they have lacked well-balanced judgment as to how it was best to teach, how it was best to help’.36 The Women’s Municipal League of Boston began to give sex lectures, ‘realizing the physical misery which is resulting from ignorance in regard to matters of sex, and the spiritual degradation following the wrong conception of the high purpose of the sex function, to which must be added the loss of efficiency in human ability’. The League believed that there were too many dangers to justify ‘a further continuance of . . . silence’.37
Sex was a social issue, not simply a personal one. In both the US and Britain, sex hygienists approached the topic in terms of efficiency and regulation. Warning of the dangers of promiscuity in lurid terms, their emphasis was on the interests of the body politic, which they equated with the heterosexual family and parenthood. Nonetheless they too were part of a profound cultural shift. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private intimacies were coming out into the public gaze and becoming a topic for public discourse.
This transposition presented a dilemma about how to discuss sexual practices and relationships. The free lovers Ezra and Angela Heywood advocated words in common use. Angela Heywood wrote in 1887: ‘Such graceful terms as hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, fucking, throbbing, kissing, and kin words are telephone expressions, lighthouses of intercourse centrally immutable to the situation; their aptness, euphony and serviceable persistence make it as impossible and undesirable to put them out of pure use as it would be to take oxygen out of air.’38